Ok, as those of you who have been following along know I am in the midst of my student teaching. Which means that along with full-time teaching, I have to start looking for a job. As January is not prime teacher-hireing season, my only real chance of getting a job is by saturating every school system in the area I want to move to , so that when somebody flakes out or gets pregnant or gets called up into the reserves they already have my application on file.
Here’s my beef. In education classes a whole lot of hoopla is made about how teaching is a “profession” (I suspect that they don’t bother to hammer that into the heads of proto-doctors nad lawyers). My question is: If this is a profession, why does seeking a job require:
Four page application
Scantron sheet detailing my vital stats, dates avalible, certification, and zodiac sign (almost)
Second scantron sheet with just my vital stats, for the background check
Four more scan tron sheets of the Name, phone numbers, and addresses of my references
Letters of recomendation from said referneces
Two hand written responses to essay questions
Copy of every transcript of every institution I’ve ever driven past.
Proof of certification
They are not all quite as bad as this one, but most want some variation of the 8 items listed above. It is the scan-tron refrence sheets that drive me batty–I have to spend 45 minutes filling in bubbles to save somone 5 minutes of entering them into a computer? Or they couldn’t just request a typed reference list to be included in my file?
And why they have all the friggin’ paperwork–they wanna know just…how…much you want that job. “Hey, we’re not Joe’s Bar & Grill,” they’re saying. “We’re not hiring winos off the street to push broom for a couple of hours. These are America’s Children we’re entrusting to these people, the Future of the Nation. If we give them teachers who don’t know how to run a copy machine, we might as well give the Taliban the key to the White House and go live in cabins out in Montana.”
What I want to know is, if the screening procedure is that intense, where do these teachers who report kids for pointing chicken wings at each other come from?
Because unlike lawyers, you’re working with children. My child. And I want to make damn sure that my child is going to be in good hands for the 6 or so hours each day that he/she is with you.
The future of the world is in your hands, and that’s a mighty big responsibility.
A better question is, “Why aren’t you getting paid better to educate the future of the world?”
A scantron sheet is a page torn from the devil’s guide to ruining the universe. It is an evil sheet of paper filled with circles (“bubbles”) that must be filled completely with a #2 paper. God help you if you go outside of the circle.
They run through machines that are actually just very still demons. These demons can interpret properly filled out sheets to determine your worth as a human being. If you filled out the circles incorrectly they just assume that you’re scum and invalidate the whole thing.
The most common usage of scantrons are in the SAT. Which just further proves the evil they embody.
Won’t work. Wvery application asks for the same information, but they are all different, and most are printed on some interesting shade of paper.
You can’t Xerox scan-trons
The essays have to be “handwritten, in your own handwriting” and all ask "Why do you want to work for (insert school district name).
SmeelMeel:
This dosen’t prove a damn thing about my hands, except that I can be trusted to fill out little bubbles correctly. I wouldn’t bitch about a grueling threee day interview process, or an invasive background check, or having to take a comentancy test (which I do have to do, over nad over again at differenct levels). This is none of that, this is just tedious.
Again–it’s not intiensive, just tedious. And what makes it worse is that I suspect it is all irrelevant–when an English teacher says they can’t come back in Jan, I suspect they will just call everyone in the file.
You could, of course, let supply and demand work for you instead of against you.
I know one young woman here in the DC area who actively had 3 school districts arguing over which one got to hire her. She never complained about paperwork in my presence. But her husband complained that they kept calling all the time.
One year in Prince George’s County and then she dropped a line to a district in Virginia (where she lives) and they hired her on the spot.
Not that I’m saying that you should base your choice of homes on such a thing. All I want to make clear is that there are other options.
It’s not because you want a teaching job. It’s because you want a “government” job. All city, state, and federal jobs require lots of paperwork. Sometimes they require unnecessary tests. I had to take a typing test once, when applying to be a computer programmer. The person who interviewed me said they completely ignored the test. A lot of programmers can’t touch type.
[sub]But it is Montana! Come on, cut us some slack; we’re not all antisocial lunatics![/sub]
Oh, and Manda JO, I sympathize. I applied for teaching jobs several years ago, and the process was almost as irritating as the one you describe. However, I had to drive to get the applications (some schools were as much as 45 minutes away by highway), because we were living in a temporary location.
Applicant paperwork labor = Free
Administrative Data Entry for “potential” employees = expensive
The happiness of your staff that do not have to do 12 hours of data entry every time they do a round of hiring = priceless.
If you don’t have the patience to fill out Scan-trons, how are you gonna teach kids 8 hours a day??
It helps weed out people. Many people will not go through the trouble to do it. They ARE tedious, but at least it’s reasonable objective over a human looking over a cover letter (?).
Lindy… I love Montana. Can I come up for a hunting trip?
